Niels Bohr: The Man, His Science, and the World They Changed
Ruth Moore
The MIT Press (1985)
Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science
David Lindley
Doubleday (2007)
Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics
Gino Segré
Viking (2007)
Copenhagen
Michael Frayn
Anchor Books (2000)
[The acclaimed play about the 1941 meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg]
Niels Bohr's Times, in Physics, Philosophy and Polity
Abraham Pais
Clarendon Press (1991)
[A fine detailed biography; the author had been a practicing physicist]
[Chapter 11 is available on the Articles of Interest page]
Einstein: His Life and Universe
Walter Isaacson
Simon & Schuster
[Of course there's much more to Einstein than Quantum Mechanics in this biography]
The Strangest Man; The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom
Graham Farmelo
Basic Books (2009)
[An excellent biography of P. A. M. Dirac, the co-developer of quantum mechanics and who derived the great Dirac Equation which included the first prediction of anti-matter]
Schrödinger: Life and Thought
Walter Moore
Cambridge University Press: Canto Classics (1989) (513 pages)
[Detailed biography of the man and his work, including some mathematical development]
Helgoland – Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution
Carlo Rovelli
Riverhead Books (2020); translation (2021)
Through Two Doors at Once – The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Quantum Reality
Anil Ananthaswamy
Duckworth (2020)
[About the double-slit experiment, which characterizes the essential mysteries of quantum mechanics]
Great Physicists – The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking
William H. Cropper
Oxford University Press (2001)
[A really fine book for those who can handle the math or are able skip over it. Apparently out of print and fairly expensive now.]
The Quantum Physicists, and an Introduction to their Physics
William H. Cropper
Oxford University Press (1970)
[Excellent book with a section on Quantum Mechanics (see under Articles of Interest), with chapters
Reluctant Revolutionary – Max Planck
Science by Conversation – Niels Bohr
The Scientist as Critic – Wolfgang Pauli
Matrix Mechanics – Werner Heisenberg
Wave Mechanics – Erwin Schrödinger and Louis de Broglie
as well as a section on Nuclear Physics featuring Marie Curie, Ernest Rutherford, Lise Meitner, and Enrico Fermi]
What is Life?
Erwin Schrödinger
[Based on his 1943 lectures. James Watson and Francis Crick acknowledged the influence that the book had on them in their development of the double helix.]
[The entire book is available as the file "What is Life" (196 pages including "Mind and Matter" and "Autobiographical Sketches"]
Page last modified on Jan. 9 2023